


Leap Before You Look

by out_there



Category: Dead Like Me
Genre: Gen, Yuletide 2013
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:23:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/out_there/pseuds/out_there
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Listening to other people’s warnings is like looking before she leaps: she didn’t do it when she was alive, and she’s not about to start now that she’s dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leap Before You Look

**Author's Note:**

  * For [quietcuriosity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietcuriosity/gifts).



> For Yuletide 2013. Thanks to my betas, Oxoniensis, Celli, China_Shop and Skinscript. At such short notice, they did a wonderful job and improved this immensely. Title is from W.H.Alden’s poem, “Leap Before You Look”.

People always say you should look before you leap.

If she’d looked, Betty wouldn’t have died at twenty-seven, too young and too pretty. She might have married that boy, or the next. She might have spent the ‘30s raising kids, might have waved her husband off to war. She’d have been a grandmother in the ‘60s, complaining about the lack of manners these days and crowding around a television screen to watch JFK get shot or a man walk on the moon. She could have spent the next two decades in a nursing home, surrounded by doilies and petal pink walls, rather than having coffee in the first Starbucks and strolling through the aisle of the first Costco.

She could have lived a life of domesticity and boredom. Instead, she’s been a Reaper for almost ninety years. She’s been drunk during Prohibition. She’s seen electricity light up Seattle’s streets and visited the World Fair; she’s watched the city grow around Boeing and then outlive it when Congress pulled funding. She’s stood in crowds and screamed for the Beatles. She’s watched television go from black-and-white to color. She’s seen fifteen minutes of fame become a season of a reality show and stories in tabloids. She’s seen decades go by, and she’s still twenty-seven, still young and still pretty.

Betty’s seen the world change, and she hasn’t let being dead stop her from living life. Given the choice again, she’d leap every time.

***

Betty’s first reap is a seventy year old man falling off a ladder. She touches him when Rube tells her to and chats to his spirit until the smell of apple blossoms fills the air, and he walks off to a glowing tree, petals shimmering as they dance on the breeze.

“Where’s he going?” Betty asks, watching the sweet old man who called her ‘little miss’ disappear into the lights.

Rube shrugs. “Not our place to know. We make sure they get their connection, we don’t get to know where they’re going.”

“That’s a pity,” Betty says, staring at the dark and empty street. “Is it always trees?”

“Every soul’s unique.” Rube doesn’t sound like he’s awed with wonder. He sounds like he’s tired and not looking forward to the cold twenty-minute walk ahead of them. “The visions are never the same.”

***

Betty’s been a Reaper for three weeks now, and it feels like the most exciting affair she’s ever had. New people and new places, the multi-colored lights of so many different heavens. She never thought being dead would be so interesting.

“So who makes the rules about reaping?” Betty asks, pulling another handful of breadcrumbs from the crumpled paper bag on her lap and throwing them to the eager pigeons around her. 

“Someone else,” Rube says, glaring at the pigeons, or the park, or maybe the world in general. There are some days when he seems to hate the universe and everyone in it, dead or alive. He’s blunt and sarcastic, and belligerently determined that if he’s forced to be a Reaper, he'll do the job right. Then there are days like this, when he’s in a bad mood.

“You really don’t know?”

The full force of Rube’s glare turns on her. “I don’t fucking know. Why?”

Betty doesn’t say she was wondering what the other rules were. The basics are simple. Make the process easy and painless (pop a soul before the grisly part; if a soul’s stuck inside a dead body, get it out as soon as you can) and respect the work other people do (don’t be rude to other Reapers; don’t interfere with the Gravelings). Being a Reaper feels like dating a married guy: there’s a little bit of common sense and a few hard-and-fast rules, but there’s a lot of wiggle room in-between.

“If nobody knows where the rules come from, how do you know them?”

Rube shrugs and goes back to trying to intimidate the pigeons. “Rumors. Trial and error. You hear that a guy in Natural Causes tried to keep a kid alive, and the soul rotted away.”

Betty doesn’t let herself imagine that; it won’t help her do her job any better. She empties the bag, shaking the last of the crumbs out across the grass. “So your time’s up when your time’s up. There should be a rulebook, that’s all I’m saying.”

“The rules are simple.” Rube sighs, like he doesn’t have time for this. Or like he’s already gone through it too many times to care. “Do your job. Don’t do anything fucking stupid.”

***

“You can’t do it,” Rube says, distracted and writing notes in a cramped little book. The corners are worn, the brown leather frayed and half the pages have been torn out.

“I don’t see why not,” Betty says.

“Just can’t.” Rube finishes writing a time and place, adding it beneath the name of the soon-to-be-deceased. He tears out the page and slides it over the table to Betty. “It gets messy. I don’t make the rules.”

Betty takes it, glancing at the address. At least it won’t be hard to get to that side of town. “I won’t tell them who I am. I just want to see how they are.”

“Don’t visit your family,” Rube says firmly, looking her in the eye. “It’ll end badly.”

***

Betty doesn’t listen. Listening to other people’s warnings is like looking before she leaps: she didn’t do it when she was alive, and she’s not about to start now that she’s dead.

***

The next day, Rube knows. She doesn’t know how he knows, but he does. He takes one look at her and grumbles, “Want to talk about it?”

“No, thanks,” Betty says, feeling those spaces in her mind. The gaps where she used to have memories of her little sister’s tenth birthday, the smell of her father’s cigars, the precise color of her mother’s favorite dress. The details are blurred now. She still knows her family. She still feels how much she loves them, but she also knows trying to talk to them again might make her lose them completely.

“I said there were rules,” Rube says, not unkindly. He’s quiet on the bench beside her, the ever-present notebook closed in his hand. “Trial and error. There isn’t a Reaper who hasn’t done it.”

Another girl might cry about it. Someone else might scream or complain.

But Betty’s always jumped. She seizes the moment, she makes that choice, and the consequences are hers. Scraped knees and broken hearts heal, and lost memories can always be replaced by something wonderful and new.

So Betty smiles, bright as sunlight, and pushes her sunglasses higher. “Never know until you try.”

“That’s the sort of attitude that leads to true stupidity,” Rube grumbles, passing her a new page.

***

Betty leaps again, decades later. She takes a moment to look at the cliffs, the glittering lights of somewhere she’s never seen, and then she runs towards it. The air rushes cold against her cheeks, the smell of salt and seaweed mixing with the squawks of seagulls. She laughs as she hits the impossible waves.

She’ll always leap, heart-first and wide-eyed. The pull of what’s next is too tempting to ignore.


End file.
